The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

Abstaining does less than nothing for the actual victims of the genocide in question. You think the dems are going to change their stance on Palestine because a bunch of leftists are withholding their votes? Most of their corporate donors are most likely either pro-Israel or don’t care. They’re going to decide it’s a safer play for them to pivot right to try and scoop up lukewarm centrist dipshits, guaranteed. Things get worse for women, immigrants, LGBT people, and the working class in general but hey! At least your hands are clean!

The way to effect electoral change that may actually have a snowballs chance in hell of helping Palestinians is to support anti-genocide reps in primaries and local elections. Get your city to pass ordinances boycotting Israeli products, accepting Palestinian refugees, and supporting international aid organizations. Even if your good local reps can’t make any of that happen, you’re getting more anti-genocide policy makers in the system who may run for higher offices next cycle.

Leftist organizing has always been from the ground up. If you want an anti-genocide president (which I fucking do too!), then work on creating the infrastructure to produce one instead of stomping your feet and insisting the Overton Window move your way ex nihilo.

Didn’t know worms could vote!

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

Have you talked to EWOC? They should have someone with organizing experience that can help guide you.

Maybe not the best decision in the world.

HOWEVER:

1. Many DSA folks (at least in my local branch) are not happy with many of national’s decisions lately.

2. Fuck you if you’re looking down your nose at the DSA while the extent of your political involvement is only just voting every once in a while.

This was a tactical misstep, sure. But my local DSA is still out there showing up for protests and strikes and unions. They’re getting bills passed in through the city council and getting open socialists elected. If the DSA is the only leftist group near you and you let this blunder stop you from doing any real activism, you’re guilty of the exact same purity testing bullshit.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

They are mortal. They do what they do because they do not fear consequences.

This has been two statements of fact, with no implied conclusions or sub-text.

They’re a part of the rapidly expanding world of so-called less lethal weapons, named such as they are because they are ostensibly less likely to send you to the ancestors when used against you. These weapons come in many different varieties, ranging from “smaller” 9 mm rounds designed to be fired at a person’s legs or torso, to the much bigger, pop-can-sized 40 mm rounds that are designed to be “skip fired” by ricocheting off pavement or other hard surfaces towards their target (police historically do not do this, and simply fire at the target).

I do not for one second buy that they were “designed” to be bounced off the ground. It’s an idiotic concept from the get-go: it’s hard enough to aim a conventional firearm. Expecting any kind of accuracy from a ricochet fired by an untrained and easily frightened moron is a fever dream. Fucking no one expected rubber bullets to be bounced into people’s legs; it was always an excuse for pigs to shoot into crowds. The casualties are a feature, not a bug.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

True. They just visit to play poker.

Relevant XKCD

I was a weird 16 year old, staying up too late on summer vacation of 2011. I had decided that asking people their favorite dinosaur was the ultimate conversation starter, and had a working theory that the more unusual their answer was, the more interesting the conversation would be. People who said “T-Rex” were lame, but “Iguanadon” would be cool, something like that.

Well, she said “Pachycephalosaurus”, which was the first one of the night I had to look up. Naturally, I was enthralled.

We talked into the wee hours of the morning, where she (being a fellow dumb teenager) sent me her Facebook profile. Before clicking, I had decided that I would look but ultimately not accept her friend request, because stranger danger and all. But when I checked out her page, it turned out we had a mutual friend! A guy we both knew had started high school with her, and moved up the coast halfway through and was currently going to my high school.

That was good enough for me, and I accepted her friend request. July 7th, 2011, around 3am.

From there, we quickly turned flirty and started talking all the time. We weren’t anything official, but I told her I loved her within a couple weeks. One problem though: she was over 400 miles away, and I was still in school with no license.

To make a long story short, we were flirty on and off for the next three years until 2014, where we both decided “fuck it” and jumped into the special hell that is long distance dating together. I got to see her in person December 14th of that year after working at a grocery store while finishing up my associate’s degree to make enough money for a train ticket, and she was my first kiss.

Anyway, college sucked and long distance dating sucks even when it’s the right person. Fast-forward to 2020 when I finally have a car & some degree of financial stability, I moved 400 miles away to live with her & haven’t looked back. Put a ring on her finger March of 2021, and married her on the beach last weekend after knowing her for twelve years. She is currently snoring gracefully in bed next to me. 🥰

End of an era. I met my wife on Omegle.

“One of the problems of the two party system is what Margaret Thatcher used to call ‘Tina’ – there is no alternative,” he said, referring to a phrase the former British prime minister used to defend her government’s stringent economic policies in the early 1980s.

“The Democratic party has this crypto-fascist element when it comes to mass incarceration, when it comes to dropping bombs … when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to violation of individual liberties vis-a-vis the national security state.”

I mean, he has a point. However, I don’t know that acknowledging the flaws in a two-party system, then running in such a way that’ll likely invoke those very same flaws is a winning strategy.

It seems to me like someone in his shoes would be more effective running for congress / rallying people around reworking our current first-past-the-post voting system & electoral college.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.

Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.